In certain fields of Georgia where cotton and jalapeño peppers once grew, there is now a different crop to be harvested: rocks of granite and quartz. In a region where farmers have tilled the soil since the
1820s, plowing the land once meant first digging up plenty of rocks and piling them in distant fields. When Atlanta-based architect Keith Summerour began designing his weekend home outside the tiny town of Gay, Georgia, he found most of what he needed to construct a
seventy-foot-high tower residence in his three-hundred-acre backyard.

“We are blessed here with large mounds of rocks left by the former farmers
who worked these fields,” says Summerour, who helped handpick the rocks
that comprise his finished home. “The farmers salvaged them when
preparing to plant and harvest, and now we’ve used them to build the
structures, especially the main tower.”

In this otherwise
featureless, though picturesque, landscape of Georgia, Pine Mountain
rises in the distance some 1,300 feet. “I positioned the house on high
ground so I’d have views of the Pine Mountain range,” says Summerour,
“but there are also farm silos in the area, so the sight of my stone
tower is not so startling.” Summerour also cites remnants of old
regional “shot towers,” homegrown munitions factories where leadshot was
made. The process involved pouring molten lead from towers into basins
of water, the precise height being key to the spherical shape the
bullets took. So Towerhouse Farm is both an anomaly and a familiar shape
in the region.

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